Interactive outdoor advertising in a bus shelter

Across the world bus shelters and phone booths have been adorned with these e-graffiti billboards, however the manufacturer is still yet to be identified (it was rumoured that Sharpie – a reknowned manufacturer of Sharpie pens were behind this but this rumour has since been silenced by a Sharpie spokeperson). Nevertheless, if the image an e-graffiti billboard portrays aligns with your company’s branding or campaigns, I’m sure with a little research you will be able to source a manufacturer of this innovative outdoor marketing medium.

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If you are partial to belting out a few tunes with your mates, accompanied with a microphone in hand and the song words bouncing across the screen, you will fall in love with this innovative website.

Online Karaoke will have you Dancing on the Ceiling

Currently the Lucky Voice library has over 6,300 tunes in it, enough to keep you going well into the early hours of Saturday morning.

Registration will get you access to 1,000 tunes for free, with access the remainder of the tracks incurring a small subscription fee.

I can see this idea being applied to viral campaigning quite easily.  If your company has purchased rights to a particularly catchy tune or jingle, why not create a downloadable ‘karaoke’ version for your target audience to download and sing along to at home?

Better yet, you could create an entire karaoke album distributed via email and downloadable online or streamed straight off the web . You can even take advantage of the ‘music video clip’ media style to promote your brand without looking too tacky, by placing your logo in the top right corner of the screen, just like the MTV branding consumers are already used to.

A night’s worth of fun for home-stricken punters looking for a cheap and fun Friday night. And a light-hearted and potentially extremely viral way of getting your brand right into the lounge rooms across the world!

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Check out the full, updated article here.

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Amazing technology….amazingly dated that is.

Now comes the 2008 version. Esquire magazine has taken on the technology supplied by E Ink (purveyors of low power ‘electronic paper displays’), to create the world’s first animated magazine cover (or second, depends if you count my slam dunking Michael Jordan magazine!)

Though the whole cover is not animated in this instance, surely this type of technology is paving the way for the future. If a magazine priced at $5.99 can afford this technology, just imagine the potential this low cost, eye-catching communications medium has as a gimmicky and disposable marketing tool as the technology becomes more widely available and is developed further.

The only catch currently is battery life.  In the Esquire magazine instance, panel is powered by a battery with a limited lifespan.  Depending on the temperature (the life of a battery depletes faster in warm weather, than in a cool environment),  this panel would last somewhere in the vicinity of 3 months.

As I am currently based in the Middle East (average temps in the mid 30′s), this could actually be a problem.  My proposed solution - is the incorporation of a paper thin solar-panel in this device, and then it will be desert proof!

Sorry Michael Jordan, I think I’ve found a new favourite magazine cover.

Pricing and Implementation

If you’re keen on getting in on the E-Ink action, I have conducted some further research into the manufacturing of ‘animated magazine covers’ similar to the technology recently adopted by Esquire magazine.

The technology is referred to as “Ink-in-Motion” (or IIM).  For a similar design to the Esquire magazine (i.e. similar sized panel) and assuming a print run of over 20,000 units, the following manufacturing costs and timeframes would apply for the hardware itself:

1. The production per panel would be approximately $14-$18, depending on the specific size chosen
2. The manufacturing time would be 2-4 months

The panels run on six coin cell batteries (you would have probably seen these batteries in a household electronic device at some stage, they are the size of a small coin)

In addition to the above timeframes, you would need to create a conceptual design of the animation (this could be created using a full animation tool such as Flash, or through a static ‘story-boarding’ technique using a flat image to illustrate each individual frame.

I would also ecommend that the creation of a conceptual design for the IIM animation was not commenced until the rest of the cover was designed, so that the IIM panel could be seamlessly integrated into the overall design and page layout.

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Real Fiction’s latest offering is this crazy thing they call the Dreamoc 3D display system.   Through the use of an off-centre glass pyramid,  these guys have managed to create a housing for free floating 3D objects which could suddenly make 3D models quite ‘consumable’ to the general market.

Imagine the possibilities. Retail stores could advertise their new products before they’re even manufactured, at home you could have a fireplace or a fishbowl without the need for mess or maintenance.

In a world of great haste, minimal maintenance and a love of shiny things, this concept could go far.

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